Simulating how religious conflict escalates tension

There just aren't enough hours in the day to read all the interesting stuff out there. I'd like to read the paper on this one, but I'm in the middle of a seminar blitz at the moment. I think these kind of attempts at psychohistory numerical sociology are absolutely fascinating. From poking my nose into the field via the talent-luck simulations, albeit by recoding someone else's model, I take the press releases with a very healthy pinch of salt. That doesn't mean there isn't anything interesting to learn from this though. My guess would be that, as with most models, they can explore a wide range of parameter space, exploring what would happen if certain conditions were met, from which we might be able to infer if similar situations are really occuring. But to be genuinely explanatory or predictive, we'd have to be very confident that the parameters explored in the model were a reasonable approximation to reality.

To create these psychologically realistic AI agents, the team use theories in cognitive psychology to mimic how a human being would naturally think and process information. This is not a new or radical approach -- but it is the first time it has been applied physically in research. There is an entire body of theoretical literature that compares the human mind to a computer programme -- but no one has taken this information and physically programmed it into a computer, it has just been an analogy. The team programmed these rules for cognitive interaction within their AI programme, to show how an individual's beliefs match up with a group situation.

They did this by looking at how humans process information against their own personal experiences. Combining some AI models (mimicking people) that have had positive experiences with people from other faiths, and others that have had negative or neutral encounters. To represent everyday society and how people of different faiths interact in the real world, they created a simulated environment and populated it with hundreds -- or thousands (or millions), of the human model agents. The only difference being that these 'people' all have slightly different variables -- age, ethnicity etc.

The findings revealed that the most common conditions that enable long periods of mutually escalating xenophobic tension occur when social hazards, such as outgroup members who deny the group's core beliefs or sacred values, overwhelm people to the point that they can no longer deal with them. It is only when people's core belief systems are challenged, or they feel that their commitment to their own beliefs is questioned, that anxiety and agitations occur. However, this anxiety only led to violence in 20% of the scenarios created -- all of which were triggered by people from either outside of the group, or within, going against the group's core beliefs and identity.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181031080630.htm